[871] Lucilius is supposed to have been the Duke of Bourbon, the pupil of La Bruyère, and the spot of ground, the park of Chantilly, the seat of the Condé family. (See page [25], § 48.)
[872] Instead of the Nonette and the Thève, two small rivers canalised by order of the Prince de Condé, our author names two other small streams, the Yvette, which has its source near Rambouillet, and the Lignon, an affluent of the Loire.
[873] André le Nôtre, a celebrated landscape-gardener, laid out the gardens of Versailles and Chantilly, and died in 1700.
[874] The calculations of La Bruyère were not always exact; thus the mass of the moon is eighty-nine times less than the earthʼs; it is 2165 miles in diameter, and revolves at a mean distance of 238,800 miles round the earth.
[875] Our author argues as if he were no believer in the system of Copernicus (1473-1543), but he only states that the sun appears to move through the firmament, for on page 484 he distinctly mentions that “the earth is carried round the sun.”
[876] If we suppose that the earth is immovable, the moon moves at a rate of more than eighteen hundred thousand miles a day, but in reality it moves at the rate of about sixty thousand miles during twenty-four hours.
[877] Sound travels at the rate of more than nine hundred miles per hour.
[878] It is in reality a hundred and ten times more.
[879] Its absolute diameter is 860,000 miles.
[880] The volume of the sun is equivalent to about one and a quarter million times the volume of our earth; but its mean density is only a quarter of that of the earth.